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Wednesday, March 26, 2014

BFI Flare: Valentine Road (2013)

In an era of mass rampage shootings in
America, body count came to define how much attention was bestowed on any one
incident by the media.Tragedies such as
Columbine, Virginia Tech and more recently Denver and Sandy Hook became hideous
international news stories, where school shootings with fewer victims got less
attention.

One of the stories that broke out of
this disturbing cycle was the tragic shooting of a young 14 year-old called
Larry King, a Latino teenager who was shot two days before Valentine’s Day in
2008.A student called Brandon McInery
shot Larry at point blank range during an I.T. class in his school in Oxnard,
California.The motive was immediately evident
due to Larry’s open homosexuality and cross-dressing…

The documentary from Marta Cunningham
explores the motivation behind Brandon’s callous execution by examining the
homophobia of the students and (some) teachers at the school, and how Larry had
provocatively days before asked Brandon to ‘be his Valentine…’ It then follows
the subsequent trial and how the story was represented in the media.

Some of the people interviewed place the
blame clearly at Larry’s feet,
because he had flaunted his queer identity and therefore ultimately deserved
what happened:One psychiatrist who gave
evidence in court said that the attention Larry showed to Brandon was itself a
form of ‘abuse’; another teacher claimed that a pride march that occurred on
the anniversary of the shooting was some sort of conspiracy; the jurors
involved in the case began to hang out afterwards and are still trying to free
Brandon from detention – even after seeing all of the evidence that he was
obsessed with Hitler and Nazism…

Some of the most unintentional horror in
the film were moments where it highlighted just how blasé most Americans had
gotten over school shootings.For
example, when the police first got to the scene that day they rounded up the
rest of the students and put them in a room with a TV showing Jaws, as if that was standard
procedure…When a teacher tried to take
the Post-Traumatic students to Disneyland for free weeks later they replied
that they “don’t do school shootings”…

The shooting of Larry occurred in an
appalling post-Columbine, pre-Virginia Tech window where school shootings were
commonplace.The racial and homophobic elements
in this case managed to warrant it widespread national attention but the sad
truth is that in the current climate of gun fetishism and reactionary polarisation,
the likelihood of this happening again is undoubtedly high.

The film is a proud celebration of Larry
and his personal confidence, with beautiful animated segments by Duck Studios that present him as a sassy young teen cut down in his prime.Yet the sickening frustration is that as beautiful and important as this
film is, it will no doubt only be seen by audiences that agree with its message.